The End is Only The Beginning: Delivering Doomsday
by StephenMcTowelie
Summary: Glenn Rhee, a delivery driver in Atlanta has his world turned upside down following the onset of a worldwide zombie apocalypse. TWD AU backstory for Glenn, Andrea and Amy. Rated T for language and violence. Chapter 3 complete.
1. Chapter 1

_**Author's Note:**_ _This is the second of four TWD prequels I am doing and the first chronologically. This one starts at the onset of the global outbreak, a little before FTWD starts and continues up until the point where Rick is first discovered by the group in Atlanta. This will have a slight AU element here but for the most part I am sticking to what I know of canon from the show and comics. Will have Carl's perspective and Michonne's of the early days of the outbreak started within the next few weeks and depending on how these all turn out I might merge them all into a full blown TWD AU storyline._

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Chapter I

Glenn Rhee, a pizza delivery man was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic along the 285 loop heading towards the south side of Atlanta. It was worse than it usually was today and it usually was pretty bad. A lot of people ordered pizzas during evening rush hour and Glenn couldn't blame them. He wouldn't want to go out in this mess to pick up food and well these days a lot of those in his generation were just too damn lazy to cook it themselves. Regardless of the reason why he was stuck in traffic the fact remained, he was stuck in traffic.

"Thirty minutes or it's free. Fuck you Atlanta." Glenn cursed the traffic.

He honked his horn as if it would make the big red truck in front of him move along any faster. This is what he had dropped out of college for? To shuttle pizzas around for a bunch of inconsiderate fucks to shove in their faces and for what, a measly 12.75 an hour? Half these jerks didn't even give good tips and he had been robbed at the door more times than he'd like to admit. Then there were the stupid high school and college kids that had pizzas sent to people that didn't even order them. Those were always a waste of Glenn's time. His parents had wanted him to become a lawyer or some shit that didn't interest him at all. Overbearing and un-fucking-believably demanding, those were the two words Glenn could best describe his parents with. It wasn't too surprising after years of living with their rigid structure that once Glenn got out on his own and discovered the ease of the slacker lifestyle he soon embraced it, a decision he was regretting now.

He thumbed through the dials on his dashboard radio. A bunch of crappy top forty songs, cookie cutter country and hip hop as always. He stopped it for a minute on a news broadcast.

"At the present time the Center for Disease control is advising Atlanta residents to stay indoors. They are expecting to have the situation under control within the next twelve hours." the report stated before Glenn cut it off and switched over to a CD.

A Motorhead song came on from Glenn's mix CD and he turned up the volume to drown out the noise of the other cars around him. He might have been Korean but he was a Georgia boy first and foremost and well "The Hammer" was close enough to Southern Rock as anything Glenn would get. The traffic continued to creep along and Glenn grew impatient as a few more tracks played through on his CD. Giving up on the direct route he decided he had a better chance taking the city streets than the highways. Once he crept forward enough to reach the nearest exit he exited the highway and got onto the surface streets where he hoped to make better time towards the address which had ordered the pizza. Fortunately he knew Atlanta like the back of his hand. He had been up and down nearly every street and back alley of this town if not for his job then for his own business on his own time. He could navigate this place without even looking at his GPS. As he went through the city at a decent pace compared to the gridlock on the loop Glenn's phone rang; it was probably his boss wondering what was taking so long. Fucking traffic, that's what was wrong Glenn thought to say when he picked up the phone. Before he could say hello his attention was jolted elsewhere.

Thud! The sound of a body hitting the front of his car startled Glenn. He looked away from his phone to see the shadow of a figure tumble around the side of his vehicle and fall behind him. Holy fuck! He had only looked away for a second. Glenn immediately stopped the car and got outside. He felt both nervous and angry at the same time; nervous that he didn't want to hurt anyone and angry that this idiot shouldn't wave been walking across the road to begin with.

"Hey mister, are you alright? I'm so sorry I didn't see you there and. . ." Glenn started to apologize.

The person he hit was lying on his stomach on the ground behind Glenn's car. He only saw the man's legs and shoes, white loafers stained with patches of dirt and smushed grass. The man's legs twitched and started to move. "Good, he was still alive." thought Glenn. The truth as Glenn would soon find out is that this man was never alive to begin with. He had died some time before he ever found himself standing in that road. The man got up slowly and awkwardly, with an unwieldiness possibly indicative of brain damage with significant loss of motor skills. Raspy sucking sounds and a deep guttural growl emanated from behind Glenn's rear bumper as he carefully started to peek around it to check on the person he had hit.

"Hey, hey you, you ok?" Glenn asked again.

There was no response, no intelligible response that is. The man started to push himself up and with clumsy, slow often misplaced movements pulled himself to his feet using the back of Glenn's car. The man's head slumped sideways; Glenn could see that the pavement had sanded away part of his left cheek and that his shirt was a little torn. The man also seemed a bit pale, leached of all color like the blood had stopped flowing within him. Kind of the pale chalky grey-white of a corpse. His eyes were glazed over and distant looking, like they had that "thousand yard stare" thing going on. Glenn also noticed something else on the man, a deep bite mark where his neck met his shoulder, tearing through clothing and skin, leaving a large reddish purple chunk of flesh opened away. Something had got him good; Glenn was surprised this man was still walking. By the look of that wound he should've bled out through the jugular and not even been on the road for Glenn to have hit him.

It was then that the man staggered towards Glenn with jerky motions making foul raspy hissing noises. That was when the moment of truth occurred to him. That was when the man actually tried to bite Glenn. It was a vicious attack, like that of a wild rabid animal. He pushed the man backwards knocking him on his butt several feet away. As impossible as it sounded Glenn knew the truth, this man wasn't a man at all. This man was the walking dead. That bite mark where he should have bled out, turns out he actually did bleed out and died, then by whatever means he came back. Glenn had heard stories about stuff like this happening the past few months. Deceased loved ones who fell ill to an unknown disease suddenly being resuscitated and trying to consume the flesh of those mourning their passing. It was mostly stuff in the realm of conspiracy junkies and bunk internet sites; you know the ones with pictures of Bigfoot and aliens all over them. Glenn would sometimes look at those late at night for a good laugh or two. Now while they might have been wrong about ET and the Illuminati controlling the weather turns out they were right on the dead coming back to feast upon the living and Glenn was staring the proof of this right in the face.

Glenn hurriedly got back into his car and slammed the door closed before the man, or the thing the man had become managed to pick itself back up and come after him. The dead man flung himself onto the outside of the car, its hands and face pressed up against Glenn's driver side window. Glenn took off leaving the walking dead man, or walker as he now called it to fall flat on its face and hands as he drove away. He saw that even after that fall the thing got up and continued to stagger after him, until lastly he saw it drawn towards a pedestrian passing by. Glenn drove out of view before he saw the conclusion of that encounter but he could only assume how it might have played out. Either the living man got gnawed upon and eaten or he managed to re-kill a dead man, if such a thing was possible. Fuck it wasn't supposed to be possible for the dead to walk in the first place, how the hell do you kill something that has no life within it?

Glenn drove at a frantic pace towards his destination, jarred and unsettled by what he had seen. He still had a job to do and walker or no walker this pizza would get to the person that ordered it. He didn't see anything else so unsettling the rest of the way to his destination but what he had seen had left him on edge, shaking with his hands on the wheel in disbelief.

He arrived at his destination, a dark jungle green single story house with maroon doors and trim. A chest high chain link fence surrounded a front lawn of rough grass, yellowed in places from over watering. There didn't appear to be anyone home. The blinds were closed, the lights were off, there were no sounds coming from inside and there were no vehicles in the driveway. Still Glenn got out and took the pizza to the front door. He knocked on the door and waited. A couple minutes passed without a response so he knocked again, tapping his foot impatiently waiting for the customer to show. "God dammit this had better not been another prank order." Glenn grumbled to himself.

All the sudden a gunshot rang out and caught the delivery man's attention. Glenn ran back to his car and stood at the passenger side of it as he caught the second gunshot being fired. A woman fired a .38 slug into the abdomen of a man coming at her with arms outstretched. The man recoiled with the force of the bullet but kept coming as if the pain didn't affect him at all, only the initial impact when the bullet struck the skin and tore through to the other side. The man's movements were familiar, just like the dead man Glenn had hit earlier on the road. Glenn watched the woman shoot a third time straight through the man's chest. Blood and bits of human entrails flew out the exit wound and dropped down onto the ground leaving a broken line of red on the asphalt leading away from the man that had just been shot through the heart. Still he remained standing, still he kept on coming. Glenn tossed the pizza in the back seat of his car. These folks clearly weren't home; they probably saw this coming and got the hell out of here before something like this happened to them. That's what this was, the start of something big, the start of something terrible. Though he had only seen two of them he knew there had to be more. This wasn't just one rabid zombie-like person breaking out of funeral home down off Fairburn; this was a full blown outbreak. Glenn watched in horror as the dead man fell upon the woman who unloaded the weapon into his chest as she was torn to pieces. The back of the walker popped open in various places spurting internal liquids like a fountain while the woman's own vital fluids drained from the bite marks on her neck, face and chest. Beneath the two as the one man feeding frenzy commenced a pool of blood expanded at their feet. There was so much blood, it was everywhere around them. No matter how much the dead man ate it never seemed sated. That is until the unthinkable happened; until the woman started to move again. The woman got up and seemingly the ravenous devouring man no longer had an interest in feeding upon her. The pair now turned their attention towards Glenn, frozen like a deer in the headlights before this gory spectacle. The start of the zombie apocalypse had begun and Glenn was standing there with a front row seat to watch it all unfold before his eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter II

Glenn stood there transfixed by what he had seen, still shuddering in disbelief. Did he just see that man eat that woman? And after taking no less than three shots to the chest at that! Even more incredulous was seeing the woman who had throat and large portions of her chest devoured stand back up. She should have been dead; she should have stayed dead! The impossible had just come into being. Unlike the man who could have still been alive after those gunshots, however improbable, Glenn watched this woman die. She was dead, dead as a doornail yet defying all logical explanation she was up, walking towards him with a clear sense of direction behind it. She was a bit slow and clumsy, often stumbling behind the one that had eaten a good sixth of her flesh. The man was still going strong as he sluggishly advanced upon Glenn; the blood loss seemed to not impede him in the least. The man, or monster that he had become had come half the distance between the woman he fed upon and Glenn by the time Glenn finally came to his senses and reacted in order to save himself from the same fate. He got into the car and fired up the engine. As he turned the key he kept a watch on the slothful cannibalistic man and its former victim, now accomplice came lumbering towards his vehicle out of the corner of his eye. He sped away leaving him or it in his wake. Glancing briefly in his rear view mirror he saw the pair turn and attack a carefree jogger coming through the neighborhood. The quick glance turned into a stare. Glenn watched the horror unfold before his eyes. This wasn't the most well to do part of Atlanta, it had its problems with gangbangers and thugs but no one here expected their neighbors whom they knew and trusted to turn around and start eating them. Glenn couldn't look away as the pair of living dead people gnawed the meat off the bones of the jogger while she was still alive, screaming in agony the whole time until the blood loss reached a point where her consciousness escaped her. Was this really happening? What was he seeing here? Did someone lace his lunch with shrooms or something? This all was just too crazy to be real.

He looked back ahead for a split second and before he looked back to the carnage in his rear view he saw an old man staggering about in front of him, without a clear sense of purpose or direction. "Oh my god." Glenn shouted as he swerved to avoid the man and sped on around him. The man moved just like the other two deceased did and didn't seem to care that he had almost been struck by a car. Instead he started chasing the car with no hope of ever catching up to Glenn. Glenn then turned a corner to get away from the slow moving man munchers behind him and drove a few more blocks down until he was forced to slam on his brakes when a bright red SUV ran a stop sign and crashed into the back of a parked car. Glenn covered his mouth in shock of what he had just seen. Were they watching the dead walk in their rear view mirrors too? Glenn crept up into the intersection but didn't see anything, human or vehicle coming down the street. They weren't being chased but maybe they had seen what he had seen, that's enough to freak anyone out bad enough to take their mind off the road Glenn presumed. Feeling confident enough that there were no cannibals close enough to get him Glenn crossed the intersection and parked along the side of the road. He couldn't just leave those people here. He might have seen some freaky shit today but it wasn't going to stop him from being a good person and coming to the aid of people who needed help. Glenn pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911 while keeping his eyes on the car that had wrecked behind him. The SUV had hit the parked car pretty hard, going at least 50 mph which left the front end of the vehicle completely crumpled up and mangled together with the back end of the car it had smashed. Thin wafting strips of smoke rose from under the cracked and folded hood. The front windshield was cracked through and through and was about ready to shatter with the touch of a feather. The driver's side window had a radial fracture expanding outward with a few droplets of red at its center, presumably where the driver had smacked her head against it during the crash. Through the cracked glass Glenn could not see the occupant so he was unsure if he or she was ok.

Meanwhile Glenn's phone continued to ring and ring and ring. Presuming it might have been a bad connection Glenn hung up and tried his call again. This time he got a busy signal. "A busy signal? This is 9 1 fucking 1!" Glenn griped in his thoughts. He hung up and tried again, this time opening the door and stepping out to go check on the wrecked vehicle's occupant or occupants. Another busy signal, so Glenn kept trying as he slowly approached the SUV. By this time several of the neighbors had come outside to see what had happened. A woman with her two children, a young man in dreadlocks and a striped shirt and an old man with a cane in one hand and a piece of chicken in the other. As Glenn got closer to the car he could make out movement inside. The driver in the front seat and the passenger, both visible only as a shadowy shape through the tinted, badly cracked glass were mobile. The driver seemed to be thrashing about in some kind of a stupor while the passenger was crawling over the front seat and reaching towards a third figure in the back seat, a child. The child, who couldn't have been more that 8 or 9 years old was screaming and kicking at the passenger whom Glenn now clearly recognized as a man. The man fell over into the back seat where the child continued to kick and writhe about. Glenn could see the back door shaking but unable to open, the side effect of child locks being set to on by default. He could also see the driver's side door wiggle a little as the driver attempted to jimmy open the door which was slightly stuck due to one of the front corner panels being pushed back over it. Glenn froze as he looked into the back seat and saw a spray of bright red paint the inside of the rear windows just after the passenger had climbed up upon the child. Glenn started to back away and hung up his phone for the last time; he wasn't going to help these people, no one was. When the front door cracked open he saw the driver lean her head out, missing a chunk of her skin from where she had struck her head against the glass. Seeing blood and a tiny exposed bit of skull from beneath the wound freaked Glenn out so he bolted and ran back to his car.

This time he didn't stop for anyone or anything and quickly made his way out of that neighborhood and onto a major thoroughfare leading towards the 285 loop. He had already encountered three distinct incidents of the reanimated recently deceased or ill, he couldn't say for sure, cannibalizing the healthy and living. Something serious was going on here. To what extent this problem had gotten he could not say but certainly that whole neighborhood was affected. Glenn prayed that this was just an isolated incident and could be contained. Maybe that was what was tying up the lines when he tried to call 911. Hopefully the authorities were aware of this and were working on doing something about it. Had Glenn been one to pay attention to the news he would have known that similar small scale incidents such as this one had occurred in remote places for years now and stories on the crank pages of the internet would have claimed they were going on much longer than that. He might have heard one or two of these reports while in the car delivering pizzas in between swapping out CDs or hooking up his iPod to his piece of crap stereo system. The reporting had always been toned down stating the occurrence as "an outbreak of an unidentified and deadly disease." rather than saying the obvious "the dead came back to life and feasted on the living." A bit of journalistic responsibility perhaps; one could only imagine the panic that would have been incited had the latter phrase been the one chosen. Nonetheless these occurrences were nothing new, England 1981, Rwanda 1989, Cameroon 1996, Thailand 1998, Cambodia 1999, Bolivia 2002, Both of the Congos, Liberia and Botswana 2006, Mexico, Belarus, Uganda, the Sudan, India, Greece, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Poland, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe and South Africa all had incidents last year in 2009. In the early months of the current year there were claimed to be such occurrences in inland California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Each time it had been a few select individuals or at worst a small isolated community that had been affected and each time the area was successfully quarantined and decontaminated. By decontaminated of course meant the victims were quartered off and left to die, or aided in their demise by the health officials or in some cases military members who enforced the quarantine. Up until now such an outbreak had never occurred in a heavily populated area and whatever contingency plan existed for such an occurrence had never been tested. For a plague with close to 30 years of documented cases it had claimed no more than 200 lives, now in the span of a single day in Atlanta alone it was poised to double that number if not more.

Now Glenn wasn't really aware of those things though he might have overheard them at times. For him this was the first time anything like this had ever happened. He couldn't really be blamed for his ignorance; it wasn't really until these incidents began on American soil that the news media really even bothered to report on them so even for the well informed this problem was perhaps a year or two old at most. Honestly Glenn didn't care where it came from or what it had done in the past, all he cared about was that it would be taken care of now and everything would get back to normal as soon as possible. He did not want to see any more of a freak show today.

There was some assurance when Glenn got back onto the 285 and back into traffic. It was normal traffic, not zombie traffic. People were just driving, albeit slowly, but no one was getting out and eating the other drivers. That part felt good; perhaps the night of the living dead stuff was just confined to that little borough he had been in. If so it would be best that Glenn put as much distance between that neighborhood and himself as he could as quickly as possible. As for where to go his first instinct was to head back to work. If he got any more orders from this part of town he simply was not going to take them. His boss could bitch and complain all he wanted to but Glenn was not going back. Why the fuck would these people send out for pizza when they clearly were eating in on themselves.

Glenn tried to get his mind off what he had seen by playing some tunes. The radio was still playing the same music as always. "Could you people be bothered to update your playlist once every ten years?" Glenn complained.

The same music as always, no emergency alert message, not even a news bulletin. That could be a good sign Glenn supposed. That put further credence into Glenn's earlier optimistic outlook on the situation. Perhaps this was just a couple of isolated incidents, if it was something more certainly there would be more made of it over the air, or anything made of it at all. Glenn assured himself that whatever it was he saw was the end of it and it would be taken care of soon enough and be little more than a blip on the evening news and a persistent meme on the crank pages. I spite of his self-assurances he remained freaked out, something inside told him this was far from over.

His fears were realized when he walked back into work and found one of his coworkers eating the contents of his boss' chest and guts on top of a perfectly good pizza. There were plenty of times Glenn had fantasized about killing his boss but when it had actually happened it was horrifying. There was also something else afoul in the pizzeria that Glenn wasn't so keen to notice, a customer lying dead at his feet just inside the door with a fork shoved through his left eye all the way in where the handle was barely noticeable. The man was dead dead, like he wasn't getting back up. "Guess it's a good thing the owner sprung for real silverware for the dine in customers." Glenn thought to himself. He then ran back to his car before his coworker decided he was sick of Italian food and wanted to try a Korean dish. Glenn sped away running over a zombified teenager in the process. With two broken legs and a crushed rib cage the teen was still alive, lying on the ground reaching up for the next foolish passer-by to chew on.

"Work was a no go, how about home?" Glenn asked himself. After a short drive up I-85 Glenn took his exit and made his way towards home. Home was a modest red brick apartment complex surrounded by trees and crawling with ivy. It wasn't fancy but it wasn't ghetto either. This was mainly a community of retired persons and college kids all crammed together with the occasional lost in life person in their mid to late 20s like Glenn thrown in there for good measure. Glenn pulled up to his apartment complex, things seemed normal for the most part. People weren't trying to eat each other. There were even people having a BBQ, eating meat that well, humans were intended to eat. All a good sign. While parking he heard the warning he heard earlier from the CDC come over the radio again, only this time he paid attention to it. ". . .Repeat all Atlanta residents are urged to remain in their homes until further notice." the message reiterated.

"I know, I know. I'm getting into my home." Glenn told the radio as he set the parking brake.

He then grabbed the pizza and took it inside with him. He locked, dead bolted and chained his front door behind him and set the pizza down on his kitchen table which was covered with empty containers of takeout food, beer bottles and magazines. Glenn then turned on the TV. Normal shows were still broadcasting; they were showing a rerun of Rick and Morty at the present time. Glenn flipped over to one of the 24 hour news networks to see if anything was being said about the outbreak. Of course not! Why report on people eating each other when someone he never heard of might have said a slightly insensitive phrase during an acceptance speech for some film award he had never heard of either. "The petty bullshit people obsess over!" Glenn complained. This is why he never paid attention to current events, nothing important was ever said. Glenn went into the kitchen and dug around in the fridge. Being the typical 20-something college dropout slacker the fridge was rather bare. Glenn's diet consisted mainly of things that could be ordered "to go." A couple of microwave chimichangas, a snickers, a half-eaten carton of shrimp lo mein, an orange and some diet Pepsi; yeah, he was really stocked up for a zombie apocalypse.

"Hey dumbass! Wait a second! I just brought in a pizza!" Glenn exclaimed as stopped himself from taking out one of the chimichangas to heat up.

If the people that ordered it weren't around to eat it there was no sense letting it go to waste; this could be Glenn's lunch, and dinner and probably his breakfast too. When Glenn opened the pizza box and removed the first slice a cacophony of car horns followed by the siren of a fire engine were heard outside.

"What now?" Glenn thought.

He had a sinking feeling today was just going to keep getting worse and worse. He didn't know the half of it.

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 _ **Author's Note:**_ _The mention of England as the earliest known incidence of a modern zombie outbreak was a reference to my crossover series "Walker Zero" although that is set in an entirely different continuity than this is. So if it seems out of place that is just me doing a meta-joke on myself. This one will probably have a few clues dropped here and there concerning it's own speculative origin story for the outbreak via ancillary characters and events since it takes place closest to the start of the global outbreak. Also I haven't forgotten about Michonne's backstory for these prequels. I will be doing that next and I also have another partially written chapter for Daryl's leg of the journey. Bear with me I tend to have difficulty getting something off the ground so updates are likely to be sluggish until I am past the opening act but I am making progress towards them._


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter III:

Glenn walked over to the window after taking a bite of pizza and parted the vertical blinds with the fingers on his free hand. He looked outside and didn't see anything. The sirens must have come from another street a block or two away, but they were close, they certainly sounded like it. He saw nothing out of the usual on the street; the city bus was still running and a man on bicycle wearing a backpack was riding along much as if it was any ordinary day. Glenn let go of the blinds and let them close in front of him obscuring his view of the street and replacing it with dusty beige plastic illuminated by the fading evening light filtering in through the gray overcast skies which had kept out the sun all day. Glenn stared at the closed blinds for a moment or two. He thought deeply, didn't blink and just remained there like a statue, pizza in hand by his side. He wondered if it was all a dream; he felt a little delirious and drowsy, maybe right now he was actually starting to wake up. Soon his adrenaline jacked nerves would be swallowed by somnolence as he was plunged out of this ocean of his own imagination. His eyes open as they were would see no further than the inside of his eyelids and the sound of the sirens fading into the distance would be replaced by the wretched whining of his alarm clock. That explanation made as good of sense as any; how else would he be able to make sense of the things he had seen today? In some insane parts of the world or in some insane times people may resort to eating people but not here, not in America, the land of plenty. Hell if someone was starving that badly it would be much easier and less severe of a crime to just run down to a store and eat something off the shelf. A twinkie would sure taste better than raw bleeding flesh at that. Even if the afflicted were beset by some ravenous rabid disorder all of the sudden it wouldn't explain the rest of what he encountered, the largest most glaring logical fallacy of them all. The dead simply do not get back up again, they stay dead. There was nothing in Glenn's mind that could rationalize that. He wasn't so much of a man of faith, more or less apathetic in the matter though his belief in the afterlife came in more of a transcendent, spiritual fashion and one that was a lot more noble and clean. Resurrection in the metaphysical sense would not come in the form of rotting meat bags whose only purpose in rising again was to go off in search of more meat. If that was the afterlife then Glenn was certain hell was very much real and that he was living in it.

Glenn blinked expecting to reopen his eyes in the "real" world, lying in his bed cursing the necessity for him to have to go to work. He left them closed for a lot longer than it would take to blink, theorizing it would take some time to let the magic work that would spring him from this dream world. When he opened his eyes nothing had changed, he was still looking at the blinds still the same distant sirens faded away only to be joined by another round of sirens heading in a different direction. He wasn't going to get out of this nightmare the easy way.

"Might as well find out just how bad this is." Glenn said to himself as he walked away from the window and went out into his small living room adjacent to the kitchen. It was really all one room separated only by a thin bar rail which Glenn had stuffed with dirty dishes, empty takeout food containers, comic books and those advertisement and coupon books that came in the mail on a weekly basis. The living room wasn't much better; there were plenty of trash and stains all over the place. His parents would have likely strung him up for being such a slob but they weren't here now were they?

Glenn plopped down on the dingy secondhand chair in front of his TV and dug around in the cushions to his left side to find the remote. He then flipped on the TV and the cable box and waited for them to power on. "And now to see what the world is saying about the situation." Glenn thought to himself. As he took another bite of pizza the screen came to life. Nothing out of the ordinary on Cartoon Network but then again it would have had to have gotten really bad for all the channels to be taken over. Glenn then scrolled through the channels until he got to one of the 24 hour news channels, still nothing concerning cannibalism, same thing with the financial news channel next down the line. The next news channel he turned to had a doctor with the CDC along with a handful of other officials and PR people for the government in a press conference for what appeared to be something related to the things Glenn had seen. "Virulent infection similar in effect to rabies caused by an unknown pathogen spreads." he saw the words scroll down the ticker.

"This must be it." Glenn said setting down the remote and proceeding to consume the pizza that had grown cold in his hand.

"The disease has an extremely long incubation time, upwards of ten to twenty years from our estimates. During this time it is highly infectious but undetectable. The pathogen exists simply as incomplete protein strands throughout the body which later are assembled into the pathogen as we know it. These strands are virtually indistinguishable from the body's own protein sequences. It's only when the first symptoms begin to manifest which we can notice traces of the infectious agent in the bloodstream. At that point death and subsequent reanimation occurs between 12 hours to 12 days which leads to the type of occurrences we see happening in Chicago. The short time frame between manifestation of symptoms and death also give us little time to study the disease in detail." the head doctor on the news broadcast stated.

"Chicago? What about what was happening here?" Glenn said to himself. This was CNN no less, they were based in Atlanta. All they had to do was look out the window and see what was going on. Perhaps it wasn't happening where they were downtown. That was comforting to some degree but the fact that the infection hadn't manifested across that much of Atlanta was overshadowed by the fact that it had sprung up in a serious manner in Chicago and presumably other cities as well. The knowledge that whatever was going on here was also happening elsewhere, and even to a more serious degree was unsettling to Glenn. Still he hoped that the whole affair could be wrapped up nicely within a few days. It wouldn't be no different than that Ebola scare; everyone thought that was going to be the end of the world and it turned out to only claim a few lives before it was contained and soon after nothing more was said about it.

"So this virus is what is causing people to go mad and eat each other?" the reporter interviewing the CDC doctor asked.

"It's not entirely accurate to call this a virus. A virus is essentially a self-replicating strand of either DNA or RNA which invades a cell. This is comprised entirely of protein sequences which makes it more like a prion than anything else we know of. Honestly it's not even fair to consider this organism as a living organism to begin with, by most accepted definitions "it" isn't even alive, it's just a bunch of chemicals. Now these proteins are harmless in the body until they gather in sufficient quantities in the central nervous system at that point it is actually the body's own autoimmune reaction which kills the patient not the pathogen itself." the doctor explained.

Whatever it was Glenn didn't care, he only wanted to know about what was being done to find a cure and fix this whole mess. He sat through a few more stories about the outbreak, one from Chicago another from Los Angeles and a brief mention of similar troubles in Jakarta. From what he heard quarantine efforts were already underway. Air travel was going to be suspended in and out of identified hotspots; Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, Lagos, Parakou, Porto Novo, Lome, Accra, Kumasi, and a host of smaller cities and regions primarily located in West Africa were listed for quarantine. Surprisingly Atlanta was not among those locations on the list. Within the US checkpoints were being set up on certain highways out of the affected zones to screen for the disease as well. These checkpoints and the quarantine in general was already starting to draw ire from the public and had set off a series of demonstrations in Los Angeles.

"I should've known California would be the first place to burn." Glenn chuckled to himself when he saw the last report. He knew he shouldn't make light of the situation but in a way it kind of helped him cope with his own fears where he was to know that other people had it worse.

"So the problem isn't just here." Glenn thought as he reclined back and yawned. It wasn't even simply confined to the US. From the looks of it the disease originated in West Africa and had since spread elsewhere around the world, just like the Ebola scare Glenn presumed. Although it was possible the disease could have originated anywhere and the lack of adequate public health resources in that part of the world could have made the spread more severe in a shorter amount of time. Then there was the fact that whatever this was had been around for decades worming it's way silently through the population and by this time when the final stage of symptoms began making themselves manifest it was too late to truly get a point of origin on the disease. All of these interesting facts and theories on the news Glenn would find himself forgetting later on sure enough but for the mean time his mind was trying to figure it all out. Apparently in Chicago residents were being screened as emergency workers sectioned off neighborhoods and went house to house testing everyone for infection. It didn't say what happened to the people who popped positive only that those who came back clean were being moved to secure areas. Glenn could only assume that as the situation escalated in Atlanta that the same thing would start to happen here. He might as well start packing and plan for relocation. The thought hadn't even occurred to him that he may be one of the infected; he simply assumed that he was clean because well; he didn't feel like a zombie.

Glenn got an old gaudy orange and brown suitcase with floral trim out of his bedroom closet and began packing a few changes of clothes and some basic necessities; toothpaste, a pocket knife, a roll of toilet paper, dry shampoo, deodorant, that kind of stuff. The suitcase used to belong to his mother hence the rather effeminate and unappealing in general design to it but Glenn didn't care, it was sturdy and had served him faithfully through many trips by car, bus and plane. It didn't take him long to pack; he didn't own too many possessions; most of what filled his apartment was garbage or dirty laundry. He set the suitcase down in the hallway beside the bathroom door and placed a flashlight next to it. He thought about it a minute and then knelt down and picked up the flashlight to take it into the bathroom with him. Glenn took a quick shower, just in case he didn't have the time to do so when the inevitable quarantine actions began in Atlanta. After drying himself off with a raggedy faded red towel patting himself down and putting on a clean white T-shirt and loose fitting lightweight pocketed grey sweatpants he picked up the flashlight and stood silently next to the bathroom door. He placed his ear against the door and listened. He heard nothing except for the low hum of the air conditioner running and the sound of distant cars whooshing by on the street downstairs and outside. No hissing, no growling, no auditory indications that the monsters had gotten inside. He gripped the flashlight tightly and raised it above his head like a bludgeon as he slowly turned the handle on the bathroom door and carefully opened it. He stepped out into the hallway and quickly checked both directions. There was no one there; he was still alone in his apartment. Glenn let out a sigh of relief and walked back into the living room and kitchen. He checked all the windows and the front door and found them all intact as they should be. He took the dull butcher knife out of the kitchen which still had a little bit of cake on pizza sauce and cheese on the cutting edge. He now had two weapons so to speak in case he found himself in need of them. With that he could relax so he turned back on the TV and watched a few prime time into the late night adult cartoons while flipping back and forth between the news to check in on how the real world was doing. He sat there trying to reassure himself that everything was going to be alright while keeping the knife and the mag-lite at his side in case it wasn't. Eventually he felt the arms of Morpheus begin to pull him into their embrace; sleep was not something he could fight forever, and even fear would be overcome by fatigue. If things got worse Glenn reasoned he had better be well rested because he may not have too many secure nights in his own bed left to look forward to once the relocation effort began here. So with that Glenn got up and resolved to put himself to bed.

Taking what precautions he could Glenn backed his couch up against the window by the front door. He flipped it on its side to make it more difficult to move and placed a bunch of empty bottles and cans on top of it as well as in front of the door. It was the only one which someone could just walk up to and break to get in, assuming these diseased people were left with enough brain capacity to think about busting into homes and buildings. The other windows would require ladders to reach as he lived on the second floor. The bottles and cans were there to alert him if someone was trying to get in; the clang of cans or the clink and shattering of glass would be enough to rouse him from whatever light slumber he managed to get. He pushed aside stacks of papers and assorted junk off the nightstand beside his bed and laid the flashlight, his cell phone and the knife there. He one last time went around making sure all the windows and doors were locked and lastly when he shut his bedroom door he pushed his computer desk up against it as a second barricade for any intruders seeking entry. Why he would be of any value in here he didn't know but fear enough told him that he wasn't safe and should in turn act that way. Glenn then laid down in his bed and stared up at the ceiling counting the dried white paint lumps laid out like stars above his head until his eyes grew heavy and he let the night take him where he needed to go.

Throughout the night the sirens call intensified as more and more incidents were reported throughout the city. He awoke several times almost as if they were at regularly planned intervals. He got up, stumbled to the bathroom and drained his bladder, still groggy and disoriented. Each time in order to reassure himself it was ok to go back to sleep he went out to the living room and checked nothing had changed, the bottles and cans remained undisturbed. Once he had seen the flickering lights of a structure fire going up several streets over to the north accompanied by the flashing lights of firefighters and police vehicles. The fire was too far away to be of concern but its existence coupled with what Glenn had seen earlier that day it was unsettling and made it difficult to get back to sleep. He had to rest, he needed his strength and so long as nothing forced him out of his apartment he was going to remain in bed whether he could sleep or not. So the last day of life as Glenn knew it came and went and the dawn of the first day of a new world was fast upon him.


End file.
